LONDON: Western countries have failed to achieve their goals with the economic war they unleashed on Russia following the onset of its spec...
LONDON: Western countries have failed to achieve their goals with the economic war they unleashed on Russia following the onset of its special military operation in Ukraine, according to an editorial by the British Spectator weekly published on its website on Thursday.
According to the magazine, the West quickly became aware that other countries were not ready to stop doing business with Russia, which rapidly redirected its oil and gas supplies to China and India. The bans introduced by the West have been surmounted with parallel imports. That said, the European economy is smarting from the consequences of its sudden rejection of Russian energy. The Spectator points out that the Russian economy was also hurt but not as seriously as Ukraine’s allies hoped.
"The West embarked on its sanctions war with an exaggerated sense of its own influence around the world. As we have discovered, non-western countries lack the will to impose sanctions on either Russia or on Russian oligarchs. The results of the miscalculation are there for all to see. <...> The Russian economy has not been destroyed; it has merely been reconfigured, reorientated to look eastwards and southwards rather than westwards," the article says.
The authors admit that in itself, the plan to declare the sanctions war on Russia "was not necessarily wrong" but point out that the West "is badly mistaken" if it continues to think that in the future, "it can fight wars purely by economic means, without bombs or bullets."
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